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thecarchik writes "Ford's new system works over a dedicated short-range WiFi system on a secure channel allocated by the FCC. The company says the system one-ups radar safety systems by allowing full 360-degree coverage even when there's no direct line of sight. Scenarios where this could benefit safety or traffic? Predicting collision courses with unseen vehicles, seeing sudden stops before they're visible, and spotting traffic pattern changes on a busy highway. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported in October that vehicle-to-vehicle warning systems could address nearly 80 percent of reported crashes not involving drunk drivers. As such, it could potentially save tens of thousands of lives per year."

In the sense of network architecture, the only way I would be even semi-okay with this would be if it really was completely decentralized and peer-to-peer. These types of systems which preach safety and security worry me, as they also could lead to large-scale privacy concerns decades down the road, since you know the various Traffic Management Authorities would jump head over heals for the ability to see real-time position of all cars on the expressway. Then a few years down the road, somebody commit's a crime in or with a car with one of these systems, a politician jumps on the new piece thinking it would make a great "brand item" for his campaign, and given a little bit of misguided legislation, BOOM. The main problem with centralizing management and data.

Though, I _am_ taking this a little far, I hope some of the things from Minority Report [wikipedia.org] never come to be.

By the way, off-topic, but is the "There was an unknown error in the submission" just there for old-times sake, or did that whole thing get ignored again?

as they also could lead to large-scale privacy concerns decades down the road, since you know the various Traffic Management Authorities would jump head over heals for the ability to see real-time position of all cars on the expressway.

Nothing says that a system like this would have to inform other cars of who you are, just that you are there. And as far as that goes, if you aren't broadcasting some sort of unique id to traffic control systems, they would only know you are say, a car traveling north at 2

But you are already broadcasting a unique ID optically whenever you drive a car in the form of your license plate, and traffic management authorities already have the technology to record license plates.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported in October that vehicle-to-vehicle warning systems could address nearly 80 percent of reported crashes not involving drunk drivers.

In other words.. those drivers who, despite not being physically impaired, nevertheless engaged in activities such as, but not limited to: tailgaiting, failing to yield right-of-way, driving too slow with reference to the speed limit and conditions, and/or performing a "rolling roadblock" by b

No, it's just not one of the primary contributors to road accidents. And not just 'according to him', research long ago established that the 85th percentile by speed were the safest drivers, slower drivers were more dangerous and the very fastest drivers were the most dangerous, at least where speed-related accidents are concerned.

Some of this is also down to new drivers or those with low confidence driving quite slowly, also drink drivers tend to drive slowly through a combination of fear that they will crash, plus the quite ridiculous idea that by driving very slowly they will attract less police attention.

.when I get outta the car and walk around the French Quarter for a bit.

You live in New Orleans and don't see sidewalks? I've spent a fair amount of time in New Orleans, most recently a few weeks ago when I accompanied my wife and daughter to the Joint Mathematics Meeting where 20,000 Hurricane-fueled math geeks wandered sweaty and glazed on those sumptuous sidewalks along Bourbon St.

Here in Chicago, sidewalks are where life happens. I grew up playing on the sidewalks off of Taylor Street in Little Italy,

I'll do you one better - role it roughly every 60 seconds - but randomize the amount of time between iterations. All these collision avoidance systems don't even need 15 seconds - people pass each other on the highway in less time than that, so if the system can deal with a 'new' car every 60 seconds then its going to be broken for plenty of normal cases.

This is slashdot. You are supposed to be familiar with why this line of thinking is wrong. Did you not learn about hash tables and their nonintuitive collision rates? The fact that you have "randomized" it doesnt change the problem.

The problem isn't that at any given moment a vehicle in operation is around only a few other vehicles. Sure, the collision rate will be small for any particular car, but there are millions of cars on the road right at this moment.. tens or even hundreds of millions of ID vs ID

LOL if you take that tone perhaps YOU should have a clue what you're talking about? Hashes as used in hash tables are small and fast to give performance. Secure hashes like those used in cryptography are 160 - 512 bits long and for the longest you could assign an ID to every atom in the universe and almost certainly still not have a collision, despite the birthday paradox.

It depends of how many random bits you have, and how often you test. The birthday paradox does not really apply here, because you don't have a problem if -somewhere- there's a car with your id, but instead only if there is a car with your ID that ever gets within (say) 10 miles of yours.

The standard java-uuid-thing has 122 random bits. That's rather a lot. Even if the birthday-paradox applied fully (it does not), you could have every human on the planet own a car, and every car on the planet create a new uu

These conditions persist [wired.com] at this one location for hours on end, every single day. How many hash challenges do you suppose there are in just this one photo?

My estimate is that there are 250 vehicles in the photo, generating 31250 hash challenges in a single moment of time at a single location.

Hundreds of billions of hash challenges per hour would be a severe low-ball on this planet, especially if we use your 10 mile radius figure. I am not full of shit [dvice.com] as these conditions [dailymail.co.uk] happen in hundreds of thousands

Whenever the car starts, generate a random ID that's statistically certain to be unique. All the short term benefits of a unique identifier without the long term privacy risks.

OK, so if you want to follow someone without being seen, you just wait a suitable distance from the vehicle and when it starts you pick up their unique code, and voila! you have an instant "track-from-a-distance" leash.

You really don't want to offer these sorts of capabilities to those who may wish you harm.

Same solution that first sprang to my mind. When the car starts generate a random number as UID. Then poll, multi-casting a UDP packet with UID and GPS co-ordinate. Receivers can interpolate to generate predictive traffic patterns in the local area. Packets can also be triggered on events, such as sharp braking or accelerating.

The Wi-fi only has limited range, so Traffic Management wouldn't be able to track every car unless it embedded receivers everywhere. Criminals will disable this anyway, so the current

Yeah, sure. And after they have that running and ubiquitous, a few years later they require that "random" number be registered with your driver's license ID on a central server.

The government (almost every government) is bitterly regretting that they ever let IP numbers be anonymous; they won't let something like this get past them.Besides, cars are a multinational business. If not the US then plenty of other countries will demand that fixed IDs be part of

It doesn't have to be eternally static, like car MAC addresses. The unique ID could change incrementally over time, along with notification broadcasts, in a way that would allow you to differentiate between cars currently within range, but doesn't allow you to recognize a car as the same one from yesterday.

A good friend of mine had a bit of a run-in with some blackmailers a couple of years ago. He got a 'phone call from them requesting £10000 or they'd kill his wife and kids and the usual warnings about contacting the police. He (obviously!) called the police and they were whisked off to a safe house for a few days while panic alarms, etc, were put in the house. To give you some idea of how seriously the police took it, the panic buttons raised the alarm in the local police station, AND in all the cars

Absolutely. Intellidrive [intellidriveusa.org] is the name for this in the US (previously VII, Vehicle Infrastructure Initiative). The plan is to specify an open protocol, some base DOT-specific applications, and then leave the field open for others to come up with creative uses for it.

And yes, the car manufacturers are on board with this. They've agreed to implement the minimum system necessary in new model cars, and anything above the minimum system is going to be how they differentiate themselves between products.

(The system is more than just car-to-car, it's car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure)

Open Standards? Doubtful. I'm sure the real engineers will design a great system - which will then be nibbled to death by green-eyeshade wearing ducks, haggling over pennies. Low bid wins again, with chips sub-sub-supplied from who knows where, with who knows what kind of buggy hard code - accidental or otherwise.
Plus the unintended consequence of 'making thigs easier for increasingly bad drivers (occupants?) in a mixed-mode system...

you know the various Traffic Management Authorities would jump head over heals for the ability to see real-time position of all cars on the expressway.

They will be getting that ability anyway.

Satellite technologies, navigation and video. Pilotless aircraft. RFID or something of that sort. There are many, many, ways of doing this. The railroads were working on the problem over a century ago.

Traffic Management Authorities would jump head over heals for the ability to see real-time position of all cars on the expressway.

They're pretty close already: http://www.southflorida511.com/Cameras.aspx [southflorida511.com] has pretty extreme coverage of highways in South Florida, and it could easily be upgraded to real-time tracking of cars with higher-definition, faster, and more low-light capable cameras. There's already enough camera coverage to do Open Road Tolling [mdx-way.com], by license plate tracking or an in-car transponder in the same lane.

Relying on each car to transmit their own position correctly isn't something that will work at highway scales; only no

There are an excellent series of essays which I found through/. [slashdot.org]. They were written by Brad Templeton (EFF chairman). In the essays [templetons.com] he outlines a lot of the objections to "robocars" (as he terms it) and many of the possible solutions. Centralized management of data need not be in place for such a system to work. His "school of fish" idea [templetons.com] I found pretty interesting...

Centralization is not the greatest of my worries. What worries me is that this technology undoubtedly has to talk to the CAN-bus to do its job, and we've all seen how easily the CAN-bus can be made to do someone else's bidding. Like disabling brakes or applying right-side brakes. At 150km/h on the freeway. Good thing the cars talk to each other and share the virus, right?

Maybe Ford can be vehicles that work. Ford is legendary for its unreliability. I have owned 2 Ford vehicles.
1. The Ford Fairmont. I pushed that fucker all over the state looking someone to rebuild the Ford Windsor engine. This piece of garbage had a nasty and well deserved reputation of dying at 40000 miles and needing a complete rebuild.
2. The Ford Ranger. The transmission in that bastard died at 60000 miles while I was 10 miles between podunk and nowhere. The transmission

...about how many lives will be saved, is that they don't take into account that once in place, people rely on them, and change their behavior accordingly. So if I feel like my car is going to alert me if I am likely to hit something, I don't feel so obliged to pay close attention to my driving -- effectively canceling out much of their effect.

...about how many lives will be saved, is that they don't take into account that once in place, people rely on them, and change their behavior accordingly. So if I feel like my car is going to alert me if I am likely to hit something, I don't feel so obliged to pay close attention to my driving -- effectively canceling out much of their effect.

Clearly giving people the tools to drive safe does not mean they will be used, the huge number of people who don't use signals at all because.. well I don't know what they think.. "nobody is there anyway?" is evidence of this.

This sounds like it could be very helpful when used appropriately, and a wash when not.

A system that alerts you doesn't imply you don't need to pay attention to what you're doing (and I hope for the sake of the US, nobody would start suing every car maker just because).

I recently drove a rented chevy cobalt, and I really didn't like the car that much. But turns out that when the exterior temperature is under about 37F, the car displays a message "Ice possible" on the dash.

It's as easy as that that now I was even more aware of the road. The way I see it, it's very helpful, but I'm pretty

I recently drove a rented chevy cobalt, and I really didn't like the car that much. But turns out that when the exterior temperature is under about 37F, the car displays a message "Ice possible" on the dash.

That's the nice thing about how technology trickles down. I just bought a new to me '02 Cadillac STS that has that same feature, along with ABS, stability control, magnetic controlled suspension, tire pressure monitoring, etc.. $55,000 worth of technology that depreciated down to $6000.

I don't disagree with that, I just think the "X lives will be saved" statements are probably way off, because they don't account for this effect.
Humans balance lots of priorities, safety being one of them. When you change another variable, you can expect people to adjust their behavior to keep the same balance of safety vs. convenience/money/etc. There isn't a lot you can do about it, it's human nature, and actually it's quite rational.

That's the same as airbags, seat belts, ABS and every other safety innovation for automobiles. It only works for cars that have them installed. If new vehicles implement them, it will just be a matter of time before the vast majority of the automotive fleet has them. After all, how many cars on the road don't have 3 point safety belts now? How many don't have airbags? In 10 years how many cars won't have those?

The inertia of an existing system is no reason to not try to improve it. Every change has to s

That's the same as airbags, seat belts, ABS and every other safety innovation for automobiles. It only works for cars that have them installed.

Its nothing like abs, seat belts, or airbags (an active radar system would be like that). If only your car had those features then your car would stop faster and if there was an accident you would have air bag and seat belt safety to save you. If only your car had this wifi talking installed then it would do absolutely nothing. Any car that doesn’t have this installed is completely invisible (apart from the driver) to all the others with it installed.

That's the same as airbags, seat belts, ABS and every other safety innovation for automobiles.

Not really. You missed the parent's point. This system only becomes useful once a critical mass of cars have it installed, and thus creates a problem similar to the free-rider problem from economics. As a car buyer, what motivation would I have to pay extra for a car with this new system installed when hardly any cars have it? The system is useless to me until many others buy it, while those others benefit from my extra early adoption expense. Why not wait for everyone ELSE to buy cars with this system, whi

You don't get them to install those things. You just mandate that all cars manufactured in or imported into the country after a certain date have those features. Existing cars are grandfathered in, but wait a few years and you will already see a large number of cars on the road supporting this system.

First of all when they made the transition to everybody having seat belts you could install your own. Second if only new cars have this system then they will keep crashing into the cars without the system. Third do you really expect all the cars on the road to be completely replaced with new models in only a few years? ((there are over 750 million cars in the world) just send that Ferrari 420 Modena and the Shelby mustang to the wreckers they don’t have wifi). If not then this system doesn’t hel

Actually, from what i gathered from TFS, this specifically doesn't require it. It simply provides an extra bit of warning if it's able to detect something bad about to happen. It still requires the driver to pay attention.

Based on that, i would say that until nearly every car has it will definitely increase safety. If you can't depend on it to work with every car, you have to pay just as much attention, but it will still give warnings on occasion.

The black box [wikipedia.org] in your car is already storing a lot of this data. I think the standard black box or computer has a very limited historical time range, it does store min/max/and average, thus the max speed for the vehicle is in their somewhere:) Just as your insurance company. [thebuzzmedia.com]

It will be completely impossible for either hacked Ford computers, or any other Wifi device operated by somebody who knows hat "MAC spoofing" means, to present inaccurate, deceptive, or otherwise unhelpful information to these Ford vehicles. I, for one, take comfort in that.

It will be completely impossible for either hacked Ford computers, or any other Wifi device operated by somebody who knows hat "MAC spoofing" means, to present inaccurate, deceptive, or otherwise unhelpful information to these Ford vehicles. I, for one, take comfort in that.
FFS, dudes, trusting the client in a life-critical application? Srsly? Srsly?

I wouldn't say "faith"; but I forsee fewer serious incidents with a system installed in a relatively small number of expensive and fairly heavily regulated objects, manned by well trained pilots, than I do with a system proposed for inclusion in common consumer vehicles, operated by any dumb bastard who manages to pass a road test(not at all a difficult task).

It would be interesting to know what, if any, ability aircraft have to reject as spurious signals that are coming from incongruous places(like grou

So your car knows that Car B is hidden behind Car C. How does the driver get informed? Is there some sort of head's up display or audio clue? All the pictures show is a line of LEDs. Besides, it's quite often the non-car items (pedestrians, debris, icy patches, etc) that are the problem. How does this system inform you that there is a deer on the road behind all that fog?

From TFA summary: "The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported in October that vehicle-to-vehicle warning systems could address nearly 80 percent of reported crashes not involving drunk drivers."

Why does the NHTSA go out of their way to exclude drunk drivers? They won't benefit at all from this system? Really?

Because the NHTSA knows that the percentage of multi-vehicle accidents involving drunk drivers is significantly smaller than the public thinks it is (most drunk driver accidents are single vehicle accidents -- ie the drunk driver goes off the road).

And of course, "addressing" nearly 80 percent of reported crashes does not mean eliminating or preventing 80 percent of reported crashes. One could also legitimately argue that by lowering the speed limit, one would also address the same crashes by giving drivers

A lot of the drunk drivers involved in accidents aren't completely shitfaced falling down drunk; they are just "a little bit drunk". Slow to react, easily distracted, and taking more risks than they should. But they will most likely notice this alert and respond to it, increasing their chances of avoiding an accident. I think this system would definitely benefit drunk drivers too.

Well, this shows how ignorant you are about the state of the law in this country. The fact of the matter is that most accidents caused by drunk drivers are caused by the very small fraction that are really very drunk. Most of the apprehensions for drunk driving, on the other hand, are on people that have statistically less chance of getting into an accident than someone who is short on sleep.

Why do you suppose that drunk driving was quickly busted down to a misdemeanor class offense after it was introduced

It could be as simple as them not validating that the system improves the reaction times of inebriated drivers.

Or the reaction time of people who are completely sober, but have a can of beer (unopened) in the car. Or a passenger who had drank alcohol. MADD statistics make rational people mad; they mis-report the truth to promote their teetotaling agenda.

There's few things more irritating to me than waiting for a red light when there are no other vehicles at an intersection.All I want is a simple way to communicate to the traffic light to let it know that I am approaching so I don't have to stop. It seems that most automatic lights I have encountered wait until I have come to a near full stop - which partially defeats the purpose.

Implement this and then BAM - instant time savings and 3+ Miles per gallon savings for every vehicle on the road.

There is a section of highway east of my town that is both a highway going north and south and a highway going east and west. It is about 8 miles long and it is 5 lanes(2 lanes going each direction and a center lane for left turns). Since it is a well traveled highway there are a lot of commercial stores on each side. The traffic lights are not just for the cross traffic at their intersection as they are for all the stores in between the lights. If there is no break in traffic for customers to get in an

There's few things more irritating to me than waiting for a red light when there are no other vehicles at an intersection.
All I want is a simple way to communicate to the traffic light to let it know that I am approaching so I don't have to stop. It seems that most automatic lights I have encountered wait until I have come to a near full stop - which partially defeats the purpose.

Implement this and then BAM - instant time savings and 3+ Miles per gallon savings for every vehicle on the road.

This is done to prevent you from driving up to the intersection at the posted limit without braking because you assume that the light will go green in time. If it's just you at the intersection that's not a problem, but when two people approach the intersection using the same assumption, mayhem ensues.

This is a required, and worthy, step on the road to driver-less (or driver-assisted, perhaps) auto navigation for heavy traffic and interstates. As demo'd on mythbusters, fuel economy goes way up (70% saving) if the cars can drive close enough to each other. As this tech evolves, intercommunication will allow for close car travel and hands-free interstate cruising. With distance sensors, infra-red far distance detectors, traffic line sensors, traffic sign readers, gps and mapping, it's almost there alrea

And I would reply with "I cannot see around the truck and past the shrub, so I will not block the crosswalk out of consideration for the bicyclist you cannot see, that's why I am not turning right on red" and "I am going just under the speed limit, you do know that speed is illegal, do you not, please see under 'less than or equal to' -- Thanks"

I'm still confused as to why cars don't already come with some kind of radar/sonar device that would tell you when another vehicle or object is sitting in your blind spot while belting down the freeway.

Actually, the BMW 7 has exactly that. It's just one of those new technologies that is going to take a number of years to filter down to all vehicles.